Media & Public Relations

New online magazine provides central point for dialog on evolution

2012-02-21

BINGHAMTON, NY – Earlier this month, Charles Darwin received an intriguing gift for his 203rd birthday--an online magazine that reports everything from biology to politics and the arts from an evolutionary perspective.

Titled Evolution: This View of Life, the magazine gets it name from the final passage of the Origin of Species, where Darwin remarks that there is grandeur in a view of life that explains how all living forms evolve on the basis of a few simple laws acting all around us. The magazine takes Darwin's statement to the limit by including our own species, in all its cultural diversity, among the living forms.

It is the brainchild of Robert Kadar, a graduate student at Binghamton University, who works with David Sloan Wilson, a well-known evolutionist who heads-up Binghamton University’s evolutionary studies program, EvoS, and the Evolution Institute think tank. Kadar envisioned a magazine that would do for the general public what EvoS does for higher education and the Evolution Institute does for public policy. Wilson loved the idea and the magazine was created by tapping into the resources of both EvoS and the Evolution Institute.

The magazine is staffed by a band of editors who represent 11 subject areas. Most are professional evolutionists, providing more authority than most popular science magazines.

“We want to portray science as it actually happens,” Wilson remarked. “Not as a monolithic collection of facts but as a process of constructive disagreement that gradually turns hypotheses into durable knowledge.”

Evolution: This View of Life includes aggregated content and original material provided by the editors and contributing authors. Perusing its sections, one can read about everything from the discovery a soldier caste in bees, to a new political narrative based on evolution, to the virtues of an ancestral diet, to the surprising anti-depressant effects of sperm.

An introductory video is set to the music and lyrics of evolutionary rapper Baba Brinkman, who explains, “Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution/Well that statement is no less true for the lives of every human...”